Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Saturday, March 18, 2017

The Big Injury

Another dream.

I am standing in the in
the too-bright white of a box store vestibule.
People push through me going in the store and coming out of the
store. Behind me, shopping carts rattle
as new arrivals pull carts from the crashed-together rows. Looking through the glass doors, I just saw
my brother-in-law talking with a checker.

My brother-in-law is the
store manager. It’s possible that my
sister is inside the store. I am standing
out in the too-bright light because I don’t want to see my sister. Not that sister.

Stop.

Reality: I have a big injury. A permanent injury.

My mother died in 1985
and my sister disconnected from our entire family. This occurred all at once. I don’t know why my sister did that. Nobody does.
Maybe money. I was in China when
mother died, when my sister fled. I was
supposed to get married and gather my whole family around when I came back home. Instead, I got my big injury.

Begin again.

I don’t want to enter
store. The light hurts my eyes. I don’t understand how my sister could just
go away. She was my friend. When I was a kid, she let me stand in her
room and listen to rock music on her radio.
I loved rock music. We were
there, together, listening to the radio when we first heard that Bobby Kennedy
had been shot.Sometimes, on school nights, I watched her rolling small tin cans into
her hair and clipping them into place as curlers. That always fascinated me.

That sister took me
places.

I once chanced to meet
her at a store in Missoula ten years after the big injury. She avoided me, would not talk to me when I
tried. Her eyes were cold like the eyes
of a plastic doll.